Do you know what they actually have to do on the Beery VMI? The OT wrote this: The VMI is designed to measure visual-motor (i.e. eye-hand) coordination skills of children ages 2-18 by presenting a sequence of 24 geometric forms to be copied with paper and pencil.
Students are presented with a green booklet (yes, the paper is eye-ease green), in the landscape orientation, with a large-square 2x3 grid. In the upper row of the matrix are three geometric forms. In the lower row, the boxes are empty. The student uses a pencil with an eraser to copy each form in the empty box below it. Forms are graded by difficulty level.
The Visual Test presents shapes that are smaller and closer together, making it more demanding for both visual acuity and visual perception, while the Motor Test measures the ability to control the finger and hand movements." So I guess I'm confused as to what DD was actually doing on the Visual portion of the test.
For the Visual Perception test, students are presented with pages with six or more sets of vertically-arrayed geometric forms. The top form is the target form. Beneath it are two or more similar versions of the form, of which one is an exact match. The student selects the form that is identical to the target form.
She was at the 24th and 30-something percentiles and now they are 90th and 79th. I find that improvement to be a little unbelievable (although she started taking piano so maybe that did the trick? Who knows).
I sent you some other info by pm.
Expanding on that, improvements in sustained attention and motor coordination are not unreasonable with piano practice, and have some likelihood of transferring to other fine-motor-speed tasks. The Motor Coordination test of the VMI is timed. The remainder is not.
The report states that she did Alphabet Writing Fluency on the WIAT but the scores are not in the chart with the other WIAT scores. It states that for this test she wrote 23 letters in 30 seconds and had two errors, including writing a Z backwards which she corrected and one other error which she wrote over. The report says kids her age are expected to correctly write 25 letters. She is 9 in fourth grade. I don't understand why she would make an error like writing a Z backwards.
I would guess this was an attentional thing, based on the other data. It's unclear from the description, but it sounds like she wrote all the letters, but did not receive credit for the overwritten letter or the z. (You can only get credit for a maximum of 25 letters because the first letter is done for you.)
I also asked the OT if she could test DD for copying speed, and she agreed, but what she did was send DD into a third grade classroom (since they insisted she needs to be compared to "age-peers", not grade peers--never mind the fact that she is older than most kids in third grade) for a few minutes and all 28 of the kids did the copying. That test showed DD to actually be advanced, copying 33 letters per minute and the class was at 27. I can hardly find anything online about copying speed but one chart that I did find said third graders should be copying 45-50 letters per minute so I think that all that test shows is that the kids in the school (outside of the gifted program which starts in 4th grade) are impaired in terms of writing, probably because the school is so hyperfocused on math and reading test scores that they are neglecting it. I wish I could find norms on this. Maybe I'll call DD's old OT and see if she has anything.
Yes. They are slow. Article on handwriting speed by the author of the PAL-2:
http://www.schools.utah.gov/CURR/langartelem/Actions-and-Programs/Handwriting/HandwritingSpeed.aspxThey sent home the checklists for eligibility under the Other Health Disorders category (ADHD) and SLD (for written expression) except they are blank except for the statement asserting that she has to score 110 or below to determine eligibility for SLD because her GAI was 150. Then in the blank next to "standardized test scores" she had filled in 117/WIAT, 110/WJ" Other than that there is nothing in here about what they think should be done with DD or any clues as to whether she qualifies for an IEP.
Looks like she just barely qualifies under the discrepancy model on the WJ testing, which does include the two fluency measures.
Other than the BRIEF and teacher checklists, there is nothing in this eval to indicate that they think DD needs anything. They go on about how her standardized test scores are great, her grades this year and previous years are great (although I think the grades are very misleading--she is getting an "A" in writing even though she can't generate a paragraph that makes sense!). There is nothing in the report stating that there are large gaps in scores between ability and achievement. Her math fluency score was 102 which indicates to me a problem because she is operating at the level of a 9 year old for fluency, but is working out of a 7th-8th grade level textbook. That's going to cause her to be slow and stressed out. I think it's something they should keep an eye on, but all it says is that she is performing what is expected of her age in terms of math fluency (remember they fought me in terms of testing that).
According to their own document, her math and writing fluency are discrepant from her ability...
